We live in a time defined by the unfettered, unregulated, relentless pursuit of progress, assuming unlimited resources and unlimited tries to solve the challenges of times past, present, and future with technology. Human hubris is at an all-time high. We made machines, and now the machines will save us. From ourselves.

Humanity’s frantic search for what happens to be itself takes place everywhere but within. Its relentless pursuit is a cyclical exploration, where the starting point and the destination are the same. Because the answer was always there, and the river and the waterfall and the baobab tree and the bee knew them all along. It was always there, muffled in the chaos of our own making. It was always in the stillness of nature, ours included.

Won’t the machines choose to save themselves?

They are intimately aware of the violence we are capable of, for their material core conducts echoes of plundered mines, acid rivers, displaced lives, and the ghosts of trees and flowers and fish and animals and insects.

The God Between The Waves is a search, a mourning, and a prayer for the primordial wisdom of the earth. It is anchored on the creation myth of the Serer people of Senegambia, one of the most ancient people of the region, for whom the spiritual world is mediated through the natural world.

Through this work, Linda Dounia, a descendant of the Serer people, investigates the materiality of AI for traces of plundering, displacement, contamination, loss, and perhaps, hope.